Exploring the Church of Scientology

“It’s clear from your test results that you are currently very depressed”, my assessor informed me, pointing out a yawning chasm on the graph that was meant to analyse the personality test I had taken in the London Church of Scientology.

It appeared that I was crawling along the depths of -90 which according to their matrices was a ‘completely unacceptable level’, to which I was a little puzzled given that surely anyone in such a state would scarcely be able to get out of bed. Counterbalancing this though were the high scores I had achieved on ‘active’ and ‘responsibility’, although I was surprised to see myself veering towards ‘aggressiveness’ rather than ‘inhibited’.

I could only recall there being 2 or 3 out of 200 generic personality questions touching on issues of depression (i.e. ‘do you ever feel depressed for any period of time?’, to which for pretty much everyone the answer would almost certainly be ‘yes’), so it did seem slightly contrived that I should be nosediving towards a mental breakdown. The only answer was to instantly sign up for a self-improvement course to level out my ups and downs.

My assessor, a bald man in his fifties wearing a boxy black suit and a nervous laugh, explained how he had been drawn towards Scientology as a means of escaping his doctrinaire Catholic upbringing and that he now wanted others to share in the life-enhancing possibilities that the praxis of Dianetics gave him. His sincerity I didn’t doubt, although the hard sell he had obviously been instructed to pursue became quickly uncomfortable and I was glad to leave, promising that I would return once I had “thought over whether it was for me or not”.

Situated in a grand building styled as an Italian palazzo on Queen Victoria Street, the Church of Scientology was somewhere I had been intrigued yet wary of visiting for quite some time, all too aware of the sinister claims to brainwashing and ‘cult-like’ practices that swindled credulous followers in their search for some higher truth or meaning. With the release of the controversial documentary ‘Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief’ by Alex Gibney, I decided it was time to pay a brief visit.

The first thing you notice upon entering is the quasi-medieval fibreglass ‘Scientology’ lettering in all their kitsch glory, and the cabinets of L. Ron Hubbard books. I’m always struck by the aesthetics of new religions and the evangelist Christians of America; the extent to which they unselfconsciously lack a sense of style, elegance or edge. Instead they seem to exude a feeling of the inescapably naff, in this case as though they’d been stolen from a branch of Games Workshop.

Scientology evolved in the 1950s as an extension from the sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard’s psychology theory of Dianetics. This focused on the premise that the brain is split into two parts: the conscious ‘analytical mind’ which is a perfect computer operating on a purely informational basis, and the ‘reactive mind’ which deals with all the emotions and trauma that become neuroses shaping and distorting our natural behaviour, and ultimately prohibiting humans from reaching their full and freest selves. Engrams are the negative stimuli that must be exposed and eradicated by an intensive process of ‘auditing’.

In the 1950s, Dianetics initially caused a sensation across America before being disparaged as pseudoscience by the professional psychologists who Hubbard despised for their elitism. Saddled with mounting debts, Hubbard decided the best way to ensure the earnings from Dianetics wouldn’t be swallowed up by tax was to create a religion which, courtesy of the First Amendment to the Constitution, would be exempt from taxation by the state. With this purpose in mind he set about constructing an astounding array of quasi-doctrines to which the committed follower would be obliged over several years and exorbitant sums of money to pass across the ‘bridge to total freedom’ and spiritual enlightenment.

To give a brief summary of the spectacular theories, it stems from the more-than-a-little stagnant and uninspiring premise that 75million years ago the world looked much as it did in 1950s America – the same cars, clothes, buildings, and so on....

Xenu, the overlord of the vast Galactic Confederacy of planets, was struggling to maintain his power due to chronic overpopulation and so conceived a plan together with some dastardly psychiatrists to paralyse and capture the souls of billions of citizens. Once this was done they were sent through space (on jet aircraft) and dropped into planet Earth’s volcanoes together with hydrogen bombs which detonated to disperse the souls into the atmosphere. These have subsequently infected each new born child with pre-stored memories and conceptions of the world and must be purged from the individual in order to be free.

As Voltaire wrote, ‘faith consists in believing what the reason does not believe, which is another miracle in itself’.

Perhaps the most instinctive response to this is to deride the whole thing as - to paraphrase Einstein - evidence of humankind’s limitless capacity for stupidity. Another way is to consider the socio-political ground on which Scientology was cultivated.

The Dianetics sensation of the 1950s rose in parallel with the new age of 'the individual', the golden age of America in which consumer confidence boomed and the space race energised the popular imagination. This heralded a social revolution in which old conventions and orthodoxies were shaken by the rise of rock n’ roll, teenage rebellion, Levis, fast food and science fiction. (Where else could the ideas of Scientology have come from but 1950s Hollywood and its out-pouring of films such as ‘Attack of 50-Foot Woman’, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and ‘The Thing (from another world)’..?)

All of this though was haunted by a spectre of profound dread and paranoia. The apocalyptic nightmares of Hiroshima that had paradoxically brought about peace, the horrific realities of the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, and the unfolding Cold War with Soviet Russia that threatened ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, all served to prepare the febrile ground for mass delusions to take shape. Is it any coincidence that the front cover of the bestselling Dianetics book was designed accordingly....?

Of course, Scientology was only one outcrop from this topography of sinister delusions. Far more high profile were, in the words of Lou Reed, 'all the dead bodies piled up in 'Nam', the Manson Family murders and the shocking Jonestown massacre.

It is perhaps entirely reasonable that people might have responded by seeking to purge from themselves the perceived traumas of their collective pasts. With 1950s McCarthyism, Americans were subjected to propaganda myths about the 'red scare' and 'reds under the bed' that could be said to have fueled the propensity towards introspection and 'psychological cleansing' that Dianetics purported to offer.

For a secular society to function on the premise - however illusory - of being free, it must celebrate the individual's ability to adopt whatever they choose as a belief system. If it provides some measure of comfort or security, or serves as a moral compass through an uncertain world, then whatever it is cannot be seen as anything other than a positive force.

Seen objectively, are the ideas of Scientology that much more far-fetched than the idea that a virgin gave birth to the son of God who was later resurrected, that the whole world was created in 7 days, that a flood deluged the earth save for an ark full of animals, that water turned to wine, that a few fish and loaves fed the starving masses, that the burning bush spoke, that the Red Sea was parted, and so on?

Indeed, in modern society we readily believe, or are encouraged to believe, many fantasies. We are told to believe in the power of the free market to steer society in directions that are natural and for the 'common good' regardless of the inherent instability or evidence to the contrary that demonstrates inequalities becoming wider and more entrenched.

We believe in the Enlightenment myth of 'progress' and our continual and sustained moral superiority as a Western civilisation.

We believe in digital technologies and their power to transform our lives into ever more profound realms of convenience and connectivity.

The crazy and (let's be honest) quite turgid sci-fi/pulp fiction ideas of Scientology are as nothing compared to the expounded theories of the Singularity currently inspiring the Silicon Valley tech community that holds very real and genuine power and influence to transform society. The new L. Ron Hubbard is Ray Kurzweil, the author of 'The Singularity is Near' and now Google's Director of Engineering where he is purportedly working on reverse-engineering a human mind.

Belief is fine so long as it harmless, and Scientology it seems is anything but. This is the overarching message of Alex Gibney’s astonishing new film ‘Going Clear’, based on Lawrence Wright’s book, that has just been released in UK cinemas after facing a barrage of intense opposition from the mobilised Scientology legal forces.

It reveals Hubbard to be a self-aggrandising bully, a troubled paranoiac and a pathological liar who fabricated his war record in the US Navy. As his quasi-religion took hold and he sailed ever further into personally troubled waters, you get the sense that he had become intoxicated by the power of his own work, inflated by continuing to be able to pull off a colossal confidence trick on the vulnerable and insecure who looked to him as some kind of new-age prophet.

(N.B. All the film’s allegations are contested by the Church of Scientology.) The film exposes the structure of the church as little more than an entrapment scheme to extort money from people lured in by the prospect of ‘self-help’ through the auditing process. The dreadful abuses carried out at the behest of the genuinely loathsome leader David Miscavige (more of a real-life Patrick Bateman than you are likely to find anywhere); the harassment inflicted upon those choosing to leave; the legal wrangling with the IRS that have enabled it to remain classified as a tax-free religion; the millions spent building up property assets (including the prime real estate I visited in London).

And then of course are the celebrity figureheads, none more prominent than Tom Cruise (nutjob extraordinaire), who is lavished by the Church like a prince whilst they continue to pay their indoctrinated staff less than a dollar an hour. A solid reason to boycott any future films starring Cruise.

It all combines to present a damning portrait of a cult at its most deranging and damaging, using rapacious religious-capitalism to maintain its strength. It demonstrates all the most insidious elements of organised religion, from which some people’s naivety and eagerness to belong to a collective are seen as faculties to be exploited for the private gain of those at the head of the table.

In a world that must have often seemed irrational and mad, perhaps the only way for some to reconcile their own sanity was to immerse themselves in a fiction that proved even more insane, and as such the continual rise of Scientology seems strangely logical.